According to President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the European common currency should be seen as something that will improve the quality of life in Estonia.
At the “Estonia After the Euro” conference yesterday, President Ilves, in his public discussion with Edward Lucas, a journalist from the British journal “The Economist”, focused on the key aspects of Estonia’s previous success stories of the 1990s and invited the public to discuss how and by which means we could use our relative advantages in the future.
“We turned the size of Estonia into an advantage – we changed rapidly. We chose the way of depoliticised civil servants. We didn’t apply all the recommendations given by other countries. We found our own way to reach our targets,” Ilves said.
According to the head of state, in future Estonia must focus on long-term objectives, as a “project-based” approach cannot be used to accomplish them.
“The transition to the euro is our next ‘project’ of national scope. Now, we need to think of how to implement our creativity and innovativeness to serve today’s objectives and not to become conservative and stick rigidly to solutions that were effective 15 years ago,” said President Ilves. According to the head of state, for that purpose we need to provide the prerequisites in our country for the implementation of long-term policies that would contribute to an improvement in people’s quality of life, while making Estonia a more attractive living environment for both our people and skilled specialists from the other parts of the world.